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Even if the perpetrators came from Pakistan, the Mumbai massacre, like
the murder of Benazir Bhutto and the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott,
proves that India and Pakistan share a common enemy in jihadist terrorism
 and they need to put their six decades of mutual hostility behind them
in order to fight the extremists.

Publicly, Rice has talked up the idea that Pakistan is now ruled by a
democratic civilian government committed to eradicating militant groups from
Pakistani soil, and making peace with India. But neither Pakistan's generals
nor India's political leadership have any doubt about who controls the
critical levers of power in Pakistan  and it's not the government of
President Asif Ali Zardari.

Witness Islamabad's response to India's call for the chief of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) organization to visit India to assist the
investigation. The ISI is an arm of the Pakistani military that has long
cultivated jihadist groups ranging from the Taliban to Lashkar e-Toiba (LeT), prime suspect in the Mumbai massacre. Pakistan's government
immediately announced that Lieutenant General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha would fly
to India to comply with New Delhi's request. A day later, however, Pakistan
changed its tune  reportedly following a midnight meeting between army
chief General Ashfaq Kiyani, on one side, and Zardari and his prime
minister, on the other,  and said a more junior official would be sent
instead. To date, no one has gone. So nobody believes the ISI takes its orders
from the civilian government. In fact, when the government tried earlier
this year to put the ISI under the control of the Interior Ministry, it was
quickly sent packing.

New Delhi is justifiably skeptical of the extent of Zardari's control
over the military and intelligence institutions that have been responsible
for cultivating the jihadists, and would be responsible for eliminating
them. Nor would it easily believe that Pakistan's security establishment,
despite its promises to Washington, has entirely renounced jihadist proxy
warfare against India. Following the December 2001 attack on India's
parliament by LeT militants that brought the two countries to the brink of
war, Washington twisted Pakistan's arm to crack down on some of the groups
it had cultivated. The LeT was even banned in Pakistan (it had to be, since
the U.S. had added it to its list of international terrorist organizations)
and many of its members were arrested. But most were simply released, and
LeT continues to operate openly in the guise of its parent organization,
Jamaat ud Dawa, while its clandestine military arm maintains its structures
on Pakistani soil.

While it's unlikely that the military or ISI leadership would have been aware of, let alone sanctioned, the attack in Mumbai, India will see the Pakistani intelligence service as key to resolving a problem it had a strong hand in creating. Nor is the ISI's current orientation entirely unambiguous: the CIA recently confronted Pakistan with evidence of direct involvement by elements of the ISI in a July terror attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. In response to the pressure resulting from the 2001 India parliament attack, the Pakistani security establishment appears to have tried to stand down some of the its key militant proxies, rather than entirely disabling and eliminating them. A number of analysts believe the LeT then moved beyond the control of its erstwhile ISI patrons, and has drawn closer to the Taliban/al-Qaeda axis, even as it continues to operate in some of Pakistan's largest cities.

India on Tuesday presented Pakistan with a list of 20 senior militant suspects based in Pakistan that it wants immediately extradited to face justice in India. Pakistan declined that request, with President Zardari saying that anyone against whom evidence of crimes could be produced would be prosecuted in Pakistan  hardly a response likely to satisfy India.

While there's no doubt of Zardari's sincerity in his hostility toward the militants, he simply does not call the shots in Pakistan  a fact India's leaders may be more intimately aware of than their American
counterparts. The Pakistani president's political weakness is not confined
to having to defer to the military in all national security matters; he's
had a hard time selling Pakistanis in general on the need to wage war on
the extremists. The majority of his fellow citizens oppose cooperation with
U.S. efforts against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Even after the Marriott
bombing, Pakistan's parliament called for negotiations rather than force to
be the dominant response to the militants.

U.S. missile strikes on Taliban suspects in the tribal areas have
escalated Pakistani hostility to the war on terror, and opposition parties
are none too happy about the prospect of their government cooperating with
India over the Mumbai massacre. Many Pakistanis see any move to accede to India's public demands as an unwarranted admission of guilt. And any large-scale move against Pakistan-based militants could bring a sharp reaction on the streets. Zardari's government is in a particularly precarious position now that it has been forced to seek an International Monetary Fund bailout to avoid bankruptcy  the conditions attached to the IMF loan will force the government to rein in public spending, intensifying the hardships being suffered by much of the population and raising the likelihood of social instability.

Unless the Pakistani military can be persuaded that its own interests lie in standing down from confrontation with India and reorienting itself to fight the jihadists, U.S. efforts to contain the crisis will be fraught with difficulty. And it's hard to muster optimism over the prospects for remaking the existential DNA of Pakistan's army, an institution whose
centrality to national life has been achieved precisely in the
confrontation with India that began at the country's birth. Certainly, the
fitful performance of Pakistan's military in response to pressure from the
U.S. over Afghanistan is not exactly encouraging. As if to underscore the
leverage it retains, Pakistan has also declared that escalating tension with India over the Mumbai terror could prompt it to move troops fighting the Taliban near the Afghan border to the frontier with India  a disastrous prospect for U.S. efforts to contain the Taliban resurgence in
Afghanistan.

India's leadership, for its part, is well aware of the fragility of
Pakistan's civilian government and of the danger that military action like possible air strikes against LeT camps inside Pakistan  can prompt a very dangerous escalation between the nuclear-armed neighbors. At the same time, the Indian public is incensed at its
government's shoddy security performance. With the Hindu nationalist
opposition exploiting the national-security failures ahead of next year's
election, the Indian government is likely to discover that showing patience
and moderation in response to Mumbai will come at a high cost.

So, to keep a lid on this potentially very dangerous situation, Rice,
Admiral Mike Mullen, and other U.S. officials have to come up with a formula that does several things at once. First, it would have to satisfy India's need to be seen to be responding to the Mumbai atrocities;
at the same time, it has to prevent a confrontation with Pakistan that
jeopardizes the U.S. effort in Afghanistan; and finally, it must avoid
provoking a domestic political crisis in Pakistan that could bring down
Zardari's civilian government. President-elect Barack Obama has made clear
his desire to resolve the India-Pakistan conflict as a basis for stabilizing democracy and eliminating terrorism in Pakistan. The Mumbai massacre, however, may make crisis-management, rather than resolution, the order of the day for quite some time to come.